


22

by somepeoplearewild



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: 22, BUT NO ONE IS ACTUALLY RACIST IN THIS FIC, Birthday, Crack, Gen, Hangover, Humor, I Don't Even Know, Kinda, MY GRANDMA WHAT A SHIT LOAD OF TAGS YOU HAVE, Mornings, Obsessive Behavior, Paranoia, Perrie is pregnant (maybe its Zayn's maybe it's Liam's she won't know til it pops out her peehole, Pranks and Practical Jokes, Racist Language, Songfic, Stalking, THE BETTER TO EAT YOU WITH MY DEAR, there is a certain point in friendship when you're allowed to make offensive jokes about each other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-25
Updated: 2013-10-25
Packaged: 2017-12-30 11:40:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,085
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1018175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/somepeoplearewild/pseuds/somepeoplearewild
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Harry hates it when Zayn and Louis but mostly Louis pull pranks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	22

_I don't know about you_  
 _But I'm feelin twenty-two_  
 _Everything will be alright if  
_ _You keep me next to you_

Harry's eyebrows furrow in disturbance, the watery sound of music just barely filtering into his waking mind, causing the dream world to fall away. His subconscious grasps at the warping edges of sleep's reality, but it continues to slide further into the darkness as awareness is forced onto him in the form of some tune, familiar but still unidentifiable to his sleep-addled brain.

 _You don't know about me_  
"But I bet you want tooo," he slurs out with the song, before he even realises what he's doing.

_Everything will be alright if  
We just keep dancin like we're_

"Twenty..." His voice trails off almost like he's falling asleep again, but the peaceful look on his face is suddenly shattered by recognition and confusion. His pale green eyes dart around the room just making sure that _she_ isn't actually in his room right now. It's been four years, but he wouldn't put impulsively popping up in her ex's room and singing him awake past her. He knows that Taylor really did mean well, but nothing says psychopath like breaking into your boyfriend's flat at four am to climb in bed with him so that your face will be the first thing he sees in the morning.

Thankfully, the coast is clear, but her music is definitely playing somewhere in his room. It makes Harry wonder if it was a hit and run type of visit from her like she just wanted to remind him of her existence. The thought makes chills crawl down his back.

 _It feels like one of those nights_  
 _We ditch the whole scene_  
 _It feels like one of those nights  
_ _We won't be sleeping_

Harry groans and picks up his phone to turn it off, but his phone is dead from not charging it the night before. In celebration of his twenty-second birthday, he went out with Louis and Niall and tried to drink himself into a coma. He's not even entirely sure how he got back to his flat though he does remember being propped against a telephone box and thinking it was the Anti-Tardis, the Tardis' red evil twin. (It is possible that he was high as well. He'll put nearly anything in his mouth when intoxicated: food, genitals, his own fist once, pills— if it can fit in his mouth, he usually won't say no. It's a terrible drunk habit; just one of many when it comes to Harry.)

Then it hits him.

Now, Harry is a man of many puns. He likes short puns, drawn out puns, fruit puns, morbid puns, but he does not like this pun: waking up on his 22nd birthday to 22 playing. It's not funny at all. He still has war flashbacks from when Taylor bought a matching beanie then wore it in her video and caused his entire fan base to lose their shit. You can't do obvious things like that when your boyfriend is one-fifth of the world's biggest band. You just can't. He nearly lost an arm in the frenzy that followed.

So the question is: who in the name of all that is punny did this?

And also where is the music coming from?

Harry looks at the stereo system in front of the foot of his bed, but it's off. He looks at the vintage record player in the corner, but it's not on either and even if it was it would be playing the Donna Summers vinyl which is still sitting on the turntable. His alarm radio is still broken from Zayn's little fit the last time he slept at Harry's place to get away from Liam's sleep mumbling and Perrie's pregnant snoring. And his iPod is on the nightstand doing nothing great. Those are the only things in his room that produce sound, yet the music is definitely coming from inside the bedroom.

Harry lifts up the covers and looks around in case someone might have accidentally left their phone in his bed. He's not so promiscuous these days, but anything could have happened last night including a person coming home with him or Harry drunkenly grabbing a phone off the bar to admire its case then absentmindedly slipping it into his pocket. (Theft, another one of his bad drunk habits.)

He rolls out of bed to check his jeans next then his coat, but all pockets are for some reason filled with bar peanuts– something else his piss drunk mind must have found interesting. He empties out his last pocket into the bowl of potpourri that Nick insisted set the mood for a classy night in with his significant other should Harry ever look for a "soulmate". But Harry hates the potpourri— all it does is remind him of a lonely middle-aged woman which makes Nick's feelings about the stuff not so surprising— so it's still a win even if he doesn't find the source of the music because he will finally have a reason to throw the bowl of dead leaves out. He's halfway through emptying out the pocket, when a small piece of neatly folded paper drops into the bowl.

Harry grabs it, thinking he got someone's number last night, but scowls disappointedly when he sees Zayn's kinda-ok attempt at calligraphy on the front.

**_To Harry_ **

He opens it, unfolding it until it's the size of a postcard in his hands.

**_On the occasion of your 22nd birthday, we hope you have just as much fun as we did with 22._ **

**_Love,  
Zayn and Louis_ **

Then, in Louis' chicken scratch right below, **_But mostly Louis!!!_**

"Of fucking course," Harry glares at the note. Zayn and Louis but mostly Louis _would_ do something like this, and knowing Zayn and Louis but mostly Louis, they but mostly he have/has gone and hid it in some impossible place. Harry wiggles around a bit to make sure that place isn't his rectum.

Thank god it isn't.

He looks under his bed and _Aha!_ s when he finds an iPod Shuffle laying in the exact centre of floor underneath his Mahogany-framed, two-mattress, caesar-sized bed that, that if it was a person, would weigh enough to have its own special done on the Discovery Channel.

Harry groans and stretches a futile arm, the tips of his fingers not even close to touching the little square. He would crawl under the bed except he can't because he thought the low frame looked so modern and sophisticated when he bought the damn thing.

_Yeah, we're happy, free, confused, and lonely at the same time  
It's miserable and magical, oh yeah_

Harry turns around and pulls the belt out of his jeans from last night then turns back, slides his arm under the bed again, and throws the belt buckle outward. He pushes it forward the rest of the way and tries whipping the belt around to movie the iPod, but it stays put, only skipping to the next song when the buckle whacks one of the buttons.

At least he won't have to listen to 22 anymore.

_It feels like a perfect night..._

Harry slams his forehead onto the plush rug beside his bed, hard enough that he can feel the hardwood beneath it reject his face's attempt to merge with the floor. Harry would be hitting up Louis to cuss him out right about now, but his phone is as dead to him as his friends are at the moment.

He stops mid-groan when suddenly, it comes to him, and Harry jumps to his feet and runs for the closet that holds his feather duster with the extendable handle.

"Who's the bitch now?" Harry grins before he darts back to his room and slides the fully extended pole under his bed. He pokes the iPod, but it seems to be stuck to the floor. He pushes harder, rolling his eyes when the unmistakable sound of Velcro splitting interrupts the song. He uses the pole like a hockey stick to smack the little square of evil into the open.

The first thing he does is cry victory. The second thing he does is cry tears of blood because the second he turns the iPod off, the song starts up from somewhere else in his room. It's then that Harry notices another note, this time hanging by a string from the device.

All this one says is:  
 ** _So close, yet so far._**

Harry releases a string of expletives, throwing the iPod at his wall. "... dick-sucking, cock-fucking, cunt-faced son of a—"

He stops abruptly when he reads the tiny scrawl from the bottom of the dangling tag.

**_P.S. Watch what you say. Cameras come in such small sizes these days._ **

"I hope you know," Harry announces loudly to the room in case there actually _is_ a hidden camera somewhere, "That in five years, I am going to tell Baby Rasa that you're really a woman, Zayn. And I'm going to show him the Best Song Ever music video to prove it. Oh yeah and, Louis? I never destroyed that SD card. Oops."

"Fucking fine!" Louis groans, bursting out of the closet while Zayn flinches back into a shelf. He hadn't expected Louis to give them up quite so easily— then again he never expected Louis to come out of the closet, but look he's done it twice now.

Harry just stares at Louis, bewildered with his mouth popped open and his eyebrows scrunched. "You were in my _closet_?"

Louis rolls his eyes and nods like it was so obvious that two of Harry's best mates and coworkers would hide in his closet and torment him with Taylor Swift on the morning of his twenty-second birthday. Because that's fucking normal behaviour for a grown man.

"The whole fucking time you were in my closet," Harry restates, this time scoffing at himself for not checking in there first. Louis _always_ hides in the closet.

"Yeah, we were. And F-Y-I, iPod Shuffles don't even have speakers. I was playing my iPod with that wireless speaker you said wouldn't work from separate rooms. It hurts to be wrong, doesn't it?" Louis smirks smugly.

"No. It's going to hurt when I wrap the back of your neck around a pole and snap it," Harry replies, then adds on: "But only for a little while" with a grim smile.

"Personally, I think that it isn't that big of a deal," Zayn mumbles behind Louis, staring at his feet because he's sad now. His son is going to think he's a woman. Zayn doesn't want to be a woman. Most of the time he likes being a dude, with the exception of his curiosity about having boobs and multiple orgasms.

"Really? Well you try waking up and thinking your psychotic ex girlfriend has slithered into your house while you're asleep and is possibly still there lurking in the shadows, waiting for you to notice her staring at you from the corner! It sounds like I'm exaggerating but, no laaf, she is absolutely insane."

Zayn's morose expression morphs into one of horror and confusion. "Did you just speak _Urdu_ to me?"

"Well... yeah. I thought it would make my point more relatable for you. You know, hit closer to home?"

Zayn's face remains frozen— eyes squinted, mouth agape, eyebrows scrunched, nose wrinkled— in absolute shock, with a little less confusion and a lot more offence.

"Wow, Harry. That was really racist. Way to ride the elephant into the room, Prince Ali."

"Louis?!" Zayn yelps in betrayal.

"What? I was just making a pun... jab."

Harry and Louis burst out laughing, while Zayn glares at them. "I hope you remember this the next time you two come back with sunburns. I'll be smacking all over your bright red, white people skin and putting rubbing alcohol in your aloe gel."

"I would just write a song about them," an American accent offers calmly.

The boys share a look of utter terror as the mass clothes on the rack is parted and a familiar face emerges from the depths of Harry's closet. That means that she was hiding in Harry's closet the entire time that Zayn and Louis were in there... That means that she was hiding in Harry's closet _before_ they were in there.

The boys are gifted with an eerily calm smile from two fuchsia-coloured lips.

"You don't know about me," they sing quietly. "But I bet you want to."

**Author's Note:**

> I actually don't know what the fuck this is. It all started with the idea of the fandom plaguing Louis with 22 on his birthday this year.


End file.
